This Translation Tuesday, we deliver unflinching poetry from Ukraine that sheds cold light on the child victims of the Russian invasion. On translating Aleksandr Kabanov’s pioneering, at-times enigmatic style, translator Marina Eskina writes: “I chose ‘The Snowman’s Son’ for its expressiveness, force, and, last but not least, because it is more translatable. It includes Biblical references with some overtones from the Russian classical poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous poem ‘The Prophet’ which in turn is an allusion to the scene from the Book of Isaiah. My goal as a translator was to preserve these references and allusions without ruining author’s stylistics. Such close reading and search for meanings brought me closer to deciphering Kabanov’s metaphorical universe.”
The Snowman’s Son
The snow of war that flies askew
ignoring all the rules,
it fiercely pierces us through and through
but partly stays the course.
Snow rested the seventh useless wing
on earth’s frozen spine,
the other luckier six it brought
underground to his son.
There, underground, the rink of ice
glitters and melts with the laughs
of kids killed casually by war:
let’s mold them a dad of snow.
But death is eerily cunning,
it swaps the crown for a pail—
amidst the hasty castling—
a carrot for the cross and nails.